Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education

Abstract

Michel Foucault is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his works are some of the most difficult to grasp. In Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education, Mark Olssen offers one of the most accessible overviews of Foucault's thought available to educators and general readers, putting into context the relevance of Foucault's thought (which is significant) to contemporary educational philosophy and theory. Olssen adds important new insights to Foucault scholarship by bringing to light the influences of other thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Habermas, and others on Foucault's development as a thinker and their influence on the deep historical materialist strand that grounds and uniquely characterizes so much of Foucault's thought.